A central office switch handles many features for a customer at the local level. These features include how many lines a customer is using and whether or not these lines have select features, such as call-waiting and call-forwarding. How the switch is programmed will establish which features and service each customer receives.
While telephone features and services are provided by the switch, billing is provided for by a different system. A Customer Record Information System (CRIS) 11 is a database containing a record of all of the features and service each customer purchases from the phone company. CRIS 11 is used to generate the bill the customer receives. It is therefore clear that the services and features provided by the switch must correspond to the data stored in CRIS 11 in order for the phone company to receive the money it is owed (i.e., avoid underbilling) and to not charge the customers for services and features they did not purchase (i.e., avoid overbilling).
FIG. 1 shows a traditional system with switches 1 to 3 where billing discrepancies are discovered by having field technicians download the data stored in the switches 1 through 3 to tapes loaded into the tape drives 4 through 6. Typically, these tape drives 4 through 6 support 9-track tapes. Once the switch data is downloaded, the tapes are physically transported, represented with trucks 8 through 10, to a Database Reconciliation Tool (DBRT) 7. DBRT 7 is typically a personal computer (PC).
The DBRT 7 also receives data from CRIS 11. As stated earlier, CRIS 11 is a database of what the service provider understands to be the services and features being used by each customer which is used for billing the customer. Data in CRIS 11 is typically sent to DBRT 7 electronically as shown in FIG. 1. However, CRIS 11 has a tape port (not shown) so that, if necessary, data from CRIS 11 can be transported to DBRT 7 in a manner similar to the manner switch data is currently transported to DBRT 7.
Once the DBRT 7 has the tape data from the switch and CRIS 11, it performs a comparison process, which involves logic comparisons, between the two sets of data to detect discrepancies. Discrepancies are printed on paper 13 and forwarded to an ESSX Billing Reconciliation Unit (EBRU) 14. EBRU 14 is a group of people who manually read the discrepancy report produced by DBRT 7. They will then generate a corrected billing statement 38 for sending to the customer which corresponds to the discrepancies between CRIS 11 and the customer's switch data. In addition to providing customers with corrected bills, EBRU 14 informs the CRIS 11 technicians so they may make adjustments to the data stored in CRIS 11 to avoid incorrect billing in the future.
Supporting EBRU 14 is a Billing Integrity Reconciliation System (BIRS) 15. BIRS 15 tracks activity on accounts and keeps statistics regarding the time an individual in EBRU 14 spends on resolving errors and the dollar amounts of any billing adjustments.
There are many problems associated with conventional collection systems such as the one depicted in FIG. 1. Most of these problems revolve around the utilization of magnetic tapes to transfer data from either the switches 1 to 3 to DBRT 7. First, collecting data via magnetic tape is labor intensive. A technician must travel to the individual switches 1 to 3, manually load and unload the tape into the tape drive of each switch in the phone company's network. The labor intensiveness of this type of data transfer is amplified by a phone company owning and operating a large number of switches. The phone company must therefore maintain and employ a large number of field technicians to complete this work.
It should also be noted that while the data in the CRIS 11 is periodically updated, it is not always 100 per cent synchronized with the data in the switch. This problem arises when a particular customer orders new services, i.e. call-waiting. Ideally, the phone company will update both CRIS 11 and the customer's service in the switch simultaneously. However, should an error occur, one of the two sets of data will be inaccurate. If it is impossible for a field agent to download the data from the customer's switch for a week or so, the discrepancy will not be discovered for a while. If the switch data is incorrect, this week or longer time period before correction could result in a disgruntled customer calling his telephone provider to complain.
Another problem with the conventional collection systems involves the volatility of the tapes. During transport from either the switches 1 to 3 or CRIS 11, the tapes may be erased or otherwise damaged due to extreme temperature, electromagnetic field, or physical impact.
Another problem with the conventional collection systems involves the cost of purchasing and maintaining all of the tapes needed to transfer the data from the plurality of switches. Even a small phone company will probably operate thousands of switches requiring it to invest thousands of dollars in a plurality of tapes.
Another problem with the conventional collection systems is the frequency that switch downloads are performed. Due to limited manpower and limited funds which can be allocated to the tapes themselves, only a percentage of all the switches a phone company operates can be downloaded in a day. Should the phone company suffer a shortage of labor or tapes, it would severely harm the phone company's ability to correct billing errors. The end result could be a switch which is not downloaded for a long period of time such that a customer is continually billed incorrectly to the point that the customer becomes disgruntled with the phone company.
Also, due to the limited manpower, there exists a latency period from the point when the switch data is downloaded to a magnetic tape to the point when the data is inputted into DBRT 7. Thus, a comparison between data retrieved from CRIS 11 today and data retrieved from a switch yesterday could introduce a discrepancy where none exists. It is simply an error of comparing old data which was in the switch to updated data in the CRIS 11.